ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the methods used in statistics to give a glimpse of the areas where statistics and operational research overlap. A primary characteristic of numbers that deal with real phenomena is their variability. The view of the world of both the statistician and the operational research scientist is fundamentally affected by the concept of a probability distribution. When a large volume of data is presented in random order the human brain is unable to encompass the volume. A series of imaginary days can be generated simply by picking individual day’s issues from the frequency distribution at random, taking care to allow the same number to be drawn as often as it occurs, in the random selection. Frequency distributions and probability distributions can be partly defined by indicating a central or average value, together with some measure of the spread or dispersion about a central value.
